In Syria, a Test of Obama's 'Good Enough' Military Doctrine

In Syria, a Test of Obama's 'Good Enough' Military Doctrine

Article excerpt

The conflict against the Islamic State is casting Syria as the
newest test of America's attempt to redefine what "winning" looks
like in the war against terror.

The lesson from the long and inconclusive wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq was that the United States could approach "winning" only so
long as it kept large numbers of forces on the ground. But
maintaining those troop levels involved unsustainable costs -
economically, politically, and militarily.

More recently, President Obama had tried walking away from the
region, but in the face of a humanitarian crisis in Syria and the
rise of the Islamic State, that approach, too, proved unsustainable.

"For a while, the policy was 'Just Say No,' but they couldn't do
it," says Stephen Biddle, a political scientist at George Washington
University.

Now, Syria is emerging as a laboratory for a "good enough"
approach in places where - as with the fight against the Islamic
State - American interests are real but limited. The idea is to
start small and build on what works.

Mr. Obama's goal is to turn the Islamic State campaign "over to
the next president in a way that's sustainable," says Derek Chollet,
assistant secretary of Defense for international security affairs
from 2012 to 2015, and now senior adviser for security and defense
policy at the German Marshall Fund.

The Islamic State, he says, will remain "a chronic problem, but
is it a problem that we can live with for a while?"

If the answer is yes, that sort of sustainability may be what
amounts to "winning" for the US in many of its foreign policy
challenges, where the best path is one between full-scale war and
doing nothing.

"They're trying to find out what this model is," says Paul
Scharre, who worked as a policy adviser in the Pentagon from 2008 to
2013, "and come up with a new approach that we haven't had before."

- - - Soon after Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that
the number of US troops on the ground in Syria would grow from 50 to
600, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona weighed in: This was "the kind
of grudging incrementalism that rarely wins wars, but could
certainly lose one."

But behind the scenes in background briefings, Defense officials
pushed back. The Pentagon's approach in Syria, put forward by
Secretary Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joe
Dunford, was not incrementalism, they argued, but rather a "step-by-
step campaign."

"As we've pushed out and built on our successes, we're just
reevaluating what different means we might need to take things to
the next step," said a senior Defense official, who spoke on
condition of anonymity. "And that's where I think 'step-by-step'
differs from 'incrementalism,' which carries a pejorative tone."

That may sound like a distinction without much of a difference,
but for a Pentagon tasked with carving out achievable goals in a war
where they have repeatedly proven elusive, the distinction is
crucial. The approach is deliberate, not reactive.

"Every single time we've gone to the White House, we've gotten
what we've asked for," the senior defense official noted.

From his years as a Pentagon technocrat, Carter is clearly aware
of both the White House's marching orders and the Department of
Defense's limitations. "The bottom line is this: We can't ignore
this fight, but we also can't win it entirely from the outside in,"
he recently told lawmakers.

The approach involves changing the way the Pentagon - and America
at large - has thought about war. The US military has long excelled
at defining its objectives in negative terms, says Mr. Scharre, now
a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Back in 2001, "We went in thinking, 'We don't want Saddam; we
don't want Al Qaeda."

That has been the case with the Islamic State (also known as
ISIS) as well. "We want to defeat ISIS, but what comes in its
place?"

And, when the US has figured that out, the question becomes how
to make it sustainable. …